The Squad Management Of Scottish Premiership Clubs
Data shows a 'short-term' focus compared to other nations
The CIES Football Observatory are a research group which specialises in the statistical analysis of football. They have recently analysed the “squad management” of football clubs from 55 leagues worldwide, to give an indication of how focused each club is on the long term.
They have done this by combining four ‘indicators’ to assign a squad management score to every club:
number of players used in the league over last three years
average stay of current players (in years)
average age at the time of signing (in years)
average remaining contract length (in years)
The theory makes sense; a club that has signed younger players, on longer contracts, is deemed to be one that is focused on the longer term - compared to a club that has signed older players on short term contracts. Similarly, if a club utilises less players, and those players stay at the club for longer, then that is also deemed to be a strong indicator of long term squad management.
Each club is then given a ‘long-term index’ score by CIES, taking into account all four indicators. For the methodology, players from the youth academy were excluded from the ‘players used’ and ‘age of signing’ metrics, and they were also excluded from ‘average stay’ if they were under 22-years old.
THE FINDINGS
Real Madrid had a long-term index of 100, the best in the world, while Paraguayan side Club Rubio Ñu had the worst long-term index of just 8.4! Madrid used just 32 non-academy players in the league over the past three years, while Club Rubio Ñu used the most players in world football - 117! Real Madrid had the second longest average stay of current players (3.15 years), beaten only by Seattle Sounders in the MLS with 3.28 years.
Brentford were second with an index of 96.7, despite using more players (46) than anyone else in the top six. Their overall index score was improved significantly due to their average contract length (3.77 years), which was beaten only by Chelsea (4.37 years).
The ranking for the top 20 clubs is up first:
It’s worth noting that Chelsea - who are ranked 9th - were taken over by Todd Boehly’s consortium in 2022 and proceeded to spend over £1 billion on players, handing many of the new signings unusually long contracts. This was to allow them to comply with UEFA’s financial regulations, by spreading the transfer fee over 8 or 10 years rather than the standard 3-5 years. UEFA promptly closed this ‘loophole’, capping the amortisation of signings over five years. As a result, Chelsea have the highest average contract length in world football (4.37 years) which contributes to their high ranking in this study, despite using 55 players over the last three years.
SCOTTISH PREMIERSHIP
In the recent UEFA landscape report, UEFA’s data revealed that our top tier had the highest percentage of out of contract players (10%) of all the top 10 nations, and a further 21% with a contract expiring within the next 12 months.
The CIES observatory’s squad management exercise mirror UEFA’s analysis, as the findings for the Scottish top flight demonstrate that on average our clubs are ‘less focused’ on the longer-term:
